Thursday, January 24, 2008

Virginia - no I didn't miss you.

On January 19th I got up at 6:00 am to begin the journey to collect Jason's Miata from the Healey parking lot in Midlothian, VA.

Yes, it's been sitting there since before we moved from that awful, retched, depressing, black hole of my life...Richmond.
No I don't know why it was left when we moved- I guess he just forgot about it in the rush.

Anyway... Melissa has given me her guest benefits for flying and it was due to this generosity and insanity on her part that made this trip possible.

The problem I had been facing in retrieving it was it was going to take two people to get it. Sue I could fly in to the "International" Richmond airport but how to get to the car? It's to far for a taxi and two far for a shuttle. I could rent a car to get there but then how to get the car back?
Melissa kindly (stupidly) offered to be the other person to help retrieve it with me.

Her day started at 11:30Pm the night before - she flew to Philadelphia and spent the night in the airport in order to get to Richmond roughly 30 minutes after I did.
We walked down to the car rental desk and picked up our car- a Dodge Cavalier 08 - and headed out into the overcast sity scape of Richmond.
I offered to show Melissa my old apt. of DEATH but for some reason she was uninterested...
Then she started laughing at me because I got us off the freeway one exit too soon (even though it didn't get us lost and I knew how to correct that little error with out turning around) Suddenly it truck her as hilariously funny that I was navigating.
humph.
We drove and we drove out into the middle of nowhere (really) and finally got to the office building and had this sad sight to great us.


We actually forgot to check to see if the rental had jumper cables before we left and it turned out we didn't - but thanks to what I believe was Jason's pilfering of my Nissan's trunk, he had jumper cables in the "trunk" of his Miata.
Which was good because this car was D.E.A.D.
Melissa popped the trunk to look at the battery...and wait, couldn't find it! I walked over and peered in cracking myself up, exclaimed "The hamsters got out!"

We ultimately found the battery with the help of the users manual, in the "trunk" of the car.
Melissa peered in and cracked herself up saying " it's only a 12volt- can't we just go to Wal-mart and get a 9volt battery?"

We then got to do the dance of "oh, wait I just had two bars on my cell phone" in our efforts not to blow the car up by hooking the wrong charge of the jumper cables up to the battery. We were pretty sure but neither had jumped a car in so long we weren't "sure", sure. I offered to call my Dad because he was used to such questions from me, but ultimately Melissa was the one who could get a call out successfully.
Yes, Healey is also in a cell phone dead zone.
So we hooked up the cars and waited.
and waited...
while we were waiting and Melissa (who lives in Phoenix, Arizona) is in the middle of complaining how cold it is, we watch as a single snow flake gently falls past our noses.
HECK NO!
After trying the car for the third time in 20 minutes we decide to wait in the rental.
The good news is it's kind of chugging.
The bad news is it's not doing much else.
That and we know we still have to drive back to the airport and then drive 7 hours to Knoxville.
This is where I crack myself up again by commenting "you, know if it was just a little smaller we could put it in my carry on."

1 comment:

Melissa said...

This is an accurate account of the beginning of our journey. I just have one tiny little adjustment, which makes me look even more heroic.

I left Phoenix at 11:30pm headed for CLEVELAND. I had a 2 hour layover in Cleveland before my flight to Philly, where I had ANOTHER 2 hour layover before my flight to Richmond. I landed in Ricmond at noon, a mear 10.5 hours after my flight left Phoenix.

I was running on about 3 hours of sleep, so I was a little "punchy."

Terra, I hope you tell the rest of the story. SO MUCH MORE happnened in the next 12 hours. :)